Through The Eyes Of
A Chinese Spirit Medium

Photostory

About the project

Project Type: Instagram Photo story

Role: Photographer

Language: English

Completion Date: 2023

About: 16 years ago, Briano Sim was chosen to become a spirit medium. Now, he spends his Saturdays giving advice to devotees.

Creative Problem:

This project was done while I was an intern at Our Grandfather Story. It was a companion piece to a hosted documentary video for the Youtube series, Hidden Hustles. I was tasked to work with the director of the video to create a 8-10 photo story. This piece had to work as a stand alone content piece as well as drive traffic to the main Youtube Video. I had to prepare a shot list for the story, photograph on set, edit the photos and work with a designer for the final layout design.

Solution:

The angle of the final photo story ended up being a profile driven piece about Briano, a Chinese spirit medium. It mainly detailed his process of entering a trance -- the prayers and rituals he had to conduct before entering the trance, when he was in a trance, and his process of getting out of the trance. As this was made for Instagram, it was shot in a 4:3 ratio and could incorporate stop motion video. In order to increase engagement with the story and follow the house style, the captions were written using a first person 'I' perspective. However, any direct quotes from the profile was put in quotation marks to denote the difference.

Process & Development

By the time I was brought onto the project, the team had already secured and pre-interviewed the profile. I was in charge of coming up with a shot list. As we were working with a tight timeline, I didn't have time to recce the location. So, as preparation all I could do was watch a lot of videos about the trance process.

On set, it was also quite challenging because I had to avoid being in the way of the video crew. Unfortunately, that wasn't always possible.

[INT] Lim Hui Ting Christine_P1934292_Internship Presentation.png

Screen grab from the official video of a split second when I was in frame.

reSULTS

The current completed work can now be found on the Our Grandfather Story Instagram account.

The main video can also be found here.

credits

Director: Goh Pei Fang

Photographer: Christine Lim

Designer: Nayli Qaisara Kaswan

Special Thanks:

Briano Sim

Made for:

Our Grandfather Story